Leaps and bounds

You know how sometimes you're slogging along through something and you're sure you're never going to make any real progress and you're starting to feel hopeless? And then something small happens, and suddenly you leap forward and start racing along, cruising smoothly through things that just yesterday seemed like great, impassable barriers?

Yep, that's me right now. In pulling out Ordinary Girl and starting to work on it again, I decided to take a look forward in the Think Sideways course to see how my working style matched up to things talked about in the course. And it meshed! And it all made sense! And I'm so excited now about the course and my book! And I realized that I was having such a hard time moving through the early parts of planning in the course because I'm actually good at those early stages, my system works very well and does the same thing (some of it is even identical). So, I am working through the plotting section of the course, using what I already have for Ordinary Girl and adding to it.

So right now I'm not writing new words, but I am working on the book, I'm excited by it, I'm getting some good insights (although I found a sticky point early on that I need a better plan for--more on the later). I'm finishing this book. I believe I will have a full first draft finished by the end of September, although I may revise that as I get a better feel for this system I'm putting in place.

Now, about that sticky point...Early in my story, my main character comes across a group of faeries in a derelict section of the city. The faeries see her, too, and the main faerie takes offense and decides to make MC's life miserable. Now granted, the MF is malicious and spiteful and generally a bitch. But would just having a human see her accidentally set her off enough to start being a stalker? I changed it so that my MC saw her doing something ungraceful, maybe stumbling over debris in the alley or something mildly embarrassing like that. But I don't know if even a malicious faerie would bother stalking a human over that. So what is it that MC sees that causes MF to be out to get her? That's what I'm working on tonight. I'm going to get back to it now, do some freewriting and see what I can come up with.